The famous milgram experiment was a hoax. The teacher volunteer was instructed to give the learner a series of memory tasks. Each time the learner failed, the volunteer was to punish him with an ever greater electrical shock in order to see whether the threat of punishment affected some one's ability to perform memory tasks. As hoaxes go, the milgrim experiment was pretty transparent. And just as wit levine's trivio test, people fell for it. They defaulted to truth. One subject wrote that he spent the night in a cold sweat and nightmares because of the fear that i might have killed that man in the chair.
On February 24, 1996, Cuban fighter jets shot down two small planes operated by Brothers to the Rescue, an organization in Florida that tried to spot refugees fleeing Cuba in boats. A strange chain of events preceded the shoot-down, and people in the intelligence business turned to a rising star in the Defense Intelligence Agency, Ana Montes. Montes was known around Washington as the “Queen of Cuba” for her insights into the Castro regime. But what Montes’ colleagues eventually found out about her shook their sense of trust to the core. (In this excerpt from Malcolm Gladwell’s forthcoming audiobook Talking to Strangers, we hear why spy mysteries do not unfold in real life like they do in the movies.)
To preorder a copy of Talking to Strangers and check out Malcolm Gladwell's book tour, visit www.gladwellbooks.com.
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